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8. Urbanization

Phil Withington

In 1621 Robert Burton moaned that ‘The Low countries have three cities at least for one of ours, and those far more populous and rich’; singular in their ‘industry and excellency in all manner of trades’. England in contrast had ‘swarms of rogues and beggars, thieves, drunkards and discontented persons, many poor people in all our Towns, Civitates ignobiles as Polydore calls them, base cities, inglorious, poor, small, and rare in sight, and thin of inhabitants’. In sum, ‘England … ( only excepted) hath never a populous city, and [is] yet a fruitful country’.1

Until recently this depiction of English towns and cities has resonated with English urban historians of the early modern period in at least three respects. First, just as Burton invoked a depleted urban culture haunted by the spectre of poverty, so the prevailing interpretative paradigm has been ‘crisis’.2 The thriving communities of the medieval era are understood to have experienced cultural declension, economic trauma, and pronounced social stratification and conflict during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.3 It was only after 1660 that an English ‘urban renaissance’ is thought to have seen the rejuvenation of many older settlements and the emergence of new industrial centres that broke the mould of the traditional urban system.4 Second, just as Burton singled out London as the exception to this rule, so historians have viewed the metropolis as an English urban anomaly – a place that experienced its own problems but also had a distinct and, indeed, positive impact on English society and economy more generally.5 The division of labour between metropolitan and provincial historiography has only served to compound this sense of London’s uniqueness.6

Third, and perhaps most importantly, just as Burton described a relative urban deficit in

England so ‘the urban’ is a less than conspicuous feature of English social historiography. 2

Peter Laslett did not regard towns and cities as a prominent part of ‘the world we have lost’, describing early modern England as ‘a rural hinterland attached to a vast metropolis through a network of insignificant local centres’. Even metropolitan London was less ‘a civic site’, than a landscape of ‘village communities’.7

This chapter argues, in contrast, that early modern England was a more urban society than has generally been acknowledged and that it became more so over time. As Burton intimates, towns and cities undoubtedly faced challenges over the period. However, more recent studies suggest that there were fair amounts of economic opportunity and affluence as well as cultural fecundity and innovation.8 More to the point, while English towns and cities themselves underwent considerable expansion over the period, they were also implicated in, and often integral to, a wide-range of practices, processes and identities, that are not generally recognized as especially ‘urban’. As a result, the full importance and burgeoning extent of urbanism in early modern England is less appreciated than in the Low Countries or Italy, where, as both Burton and Laslett note, cities were much more prominent as places and urban culture more celebrated.

The argument takes its cue from Jan de Vries’ observation that urbanization can be understood in three ways: as ‘demographic’, or increased numbers of people living in cities and towns; as ‘structural’, or the kind of institutions and activities situated in urban centres; and as ‘behavioural’, or the kinds of attitudes and practices associated with urbanism whether situated in towns and cities or not.9 In demographic terms alone urbanization was a defining feature of the era: by 1700 the number and size of English urban settlements was growing faster than in any country in Europe and London, at the centre of a national and international urban system, had become the continent’s largest city. But the structural and behavioural aspects of urbanization mean that its significance in England extended far beyond the city walls. This is because many of the historical processes now associated with early modernity 3 depended on institutions that were primarily – if not uniquely – urban. This is as true of commerce and the emergence of the early modern market economy as it is of schooling, literacy, print technology and the communication of knowledge and ideas; of law and litigiousness; of governance and the growth of the state; of trans-Atlantic colonialism and empire. All of these processes were rooted in and articulated through the English urban system, even as they had national and international ramifications; but rarely is the urban dynamic of these more general social developments recognized.

What follows suggests that these wider ramifications can be understood in three, inter-related ways. First, the urban system played a connective role in English society that was altogether more than the sum of its individual or collective parts. Second, the proliferation of urban institutions – both ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ – was constitutive of more general social and economic processes to a degree that belies their historiographical neglect. Third, urban culture was congruent with some of the key cultural trends and characteristics of the era, so much so that the urban provenance or antecedents of these trends are often lost. These connective, constitutive, and congruent aspects of English urbanism were mutually reinforcing and therefore difficult to disaggregate: people visited or lived in cities because of the institutions and resources they provided; they learned and disseminated urban-based habits and goods as a result. The connective, constitutive, and congruent consequences of

English urbanization nevertheless reveal the wider social, economic, political and cultural importance of towns and cities long before the ‘urban renaissance’. They also point to a particular kind of urbanism that is different to the Dutch and Italian models: one that is not distinct from other kinds of social organization, in the manner of the autonomous city state, so much as integral to regional, national, and imperial life; so integral, indeed, that it can often be invisible to either the contemporary or historical eye.

4

I

In 1500 just over 3% of English and Welsh people lived in cities of over 10,000 people or more – a larger proportion than in Scotland, Ireland and Scandinavia; a similar proportion to the much more populous France; a much smaller proportion than Northern Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands (Table 1 and Figure 1). By 1600 that figure had risen to almost 6%; by 1700 it was over 13%; by 1800 it was over 20% – this when the national population rose from just under three million people to over six million people over the same period. This rate of urbanization remained similar to France until 1700, when the French urban population reached a plateau of 9.2%, declining slightly thereafter; it was much higher than Scotland until the second half of the 18th century, and it completely eclipsed rates of urbanization in

Scandinavia and Ireland. Comparison with urbanized regions offers a different perspective again. Northern Italy and Belgium retained relatively large and stable urban populations throughout the period; but England was proportionally more urbanized than Northern Italy by

1750 and Belgium by 1800. Indeed of the countries grouped here, only the Netherlands surpassed English and Welsh rates of urbanization over the period and, even these regressed in the eighteenth century.

Table 8.1 Urban percentage of total population 1500–1800 (cities over 10,000)

1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800

England/Wales 3.1 3.5 5.8 8.8 13.3 16.7 20.3

Ireland 0 0 0 0.9 3.4 5.0 7.0

Scotland 1.6 1.4 3.0 3.5 5.3 9.2 17.3

Scandinavia 0.9 0.8 1.4 2.4 4.0 4.6 4.6

Netherlands 15.8 15.3 24.3 31.7 33.6 30.5 28.8 5

Belgium 21.1 22.7 18.8 20.8 23.9 19.6 18.9

Northern Italy __ 15.1 16.6 14.3 13.6 14.2 14.3

France 4.2 4.3 5.9 7.2 9.2 9.1 8.8

From De Vries, European urbanization, 38–40.

Figure 8.1

These figures show that the British Isles was unusual in its constant urbanization across the entire period. Moreover in England and Wales this trajectory coincided both with rapid national increases in population (between the 1520s and 1640 and again after 1750) and periods of national stagnation and decline (most notably in the fifty years after 1650). Of course, the threshold of 10,000+ is a crude index of urbanism. Even if urbanization is understood purely in demographic terms then many urban settlements, especially in this period, were much smaller than this. Neither does it give any sense of the hierarchy of settlement within England and Wales, nor the proportion of population living across the 6 urban system. Table 2 attempts to provide some nuance by dividing urban settlements by population size and showing the number of types, their aggregate population, and their proportion of the national population between 1520 and 1750. Immediately striking are the importance of London to English and Welsh urbanization, particularly during the 16th century, and the increasing prominence of smaller settlements, especially settlements of

10,000+ inhabitants, after 1600. Even as late as 1800 the metropolis accounted for almost half the urban population of England and Wales.

Table 8.2 Cities in England and Wales by Size of Settlement, 1520–1750

1520 1600 1700 1750

(No) Pop % (No) Pop % (No) Pop % (No) Pop %

London (1) 55 1.9 (1) 200 4.5 (1) 575 10.6 (1) 675 11

10,000+ (4) 40 1.4 (5) 55 1.3 (10) 143 2.6 (20) 346 5.7

5-9,999 (5) 30 1.1 (14) 85 1.9 (22) 145 2.7 (30) 210 3.0

2.5-4,999 (15) 45 1.0 (37) 120 2.2 (79) 245 4.0

Total pop 2,850 4,400 5,400 6,100

Population figures in 000s. Taken from De Vries, European urbanization, 64. (No) = number of settlements, Pop = population estimates, % = proportion of national population.

E.A. Wrigley demonstrated long ago that the importance of the metropolis extended far beyond its urban and suburban boundaries. Wrigley argued that not only was England unique in sustaining demographic urbanization throughout the early modern period, but that this growth precipitated a host of economic, demographic and sociological changes that together point to the deep urban roots of the . Economically these included the 7 formation of a national market, a doubling of agricultural production, greater demand for and provision of raw materials (like coal and lead), the better provision of credit and commercial facilities, improved transport networks, and higher real wages. Demographically, the realities of urban morbidity insured a balanced regime in which population did not expand too rapidly beyond available resources. Sociologically, it institutionalized what he styles ‘rational’ rather than ‘traditional’ attitudes and behaviour, allowed new kinds of social mobility and social groupings, and encouraged more fluid and emulative patterns of consumption. For Wrigley, all of these urban-induced or urban-related changes help to explain England’s industrial ‘take off’ in the second half of the eighteenth century.10

Wrigley’s ‘simple model’ is the obvious starting point for any consideration of the wider significance of English urbanization. The aim here is not to engage with its central hypothesis

– the deep urban origins of English industrialisation – so much as to backdate and historically situate his story. Wrigley focuses on demographic urbanization after 1650 because it is the concentration of large populations in both London and the northern industrial cities that precipitates economic modernity. What this focus misses, however, is that in the hundred or so years before 1650 the metropolis was already becoming the burgeoning hub to an increasing number of cities and towns within this system: that early modern urbanization involved the revivification, invigoration, and expansion of medieval urbanism as well as the emergence of what Ann Kussmaul styled new urban ‘agglomerations’.11

The geography of the medieval urban system is nicely captured by Charles Phythian Adams’ depictions of ‘pre-modern’ England and Wales as fourteen ‘cultural provinces’. These

‘cultural provinces’ were amalgamations of counties and ‘local societies’ that shared a common cultural inheritance based on their ecology and environment, customs and dialects, spatial propinquity and, most importantly, water-borne transport networks by which goods 8 and people moved. According to Phythian Adams, rivers, estuaries, and coastlines

‘orientated’ these provinces in particular directions and gave them their primary

Figure 2 The ‘Cultural Provinces’ of Pre-Modern England and Wales

From Phythian Adams, Societies, cultures and kinship, xvii. characteristics, and he named them accordingly (see Figure 2).12 Far from being static and immemorial organic entities, however, these provinces and local societies were defined by geographical mobility both internally, in terms of quotidian movement and settlement over short distances, and externally, in terms of regularised long-distance commerce, exchange, 9 and migration according to their geographical orientation. Moreover, each cultural province possessed an urban hierarchy that included provincial capitals, such as Norwich and Chester; county towns and specialised urban centres, such as Yarmouth and Ipswich, or Preston and

Liverpool; and market towns and townships, such as Thetford and Wigan.

Each of these types of settlement performed important roles within their locale and together formed provincial urban systems that structured the mobility and commerce that defined local and provincial life. On the one hand, therefore, cultural provinces formed distinct ‘countries’ in which towns and cities were integral to a local sense of identity and belonging. On the other hand, local and provincial urban networks also connected with the national urban system, through London, and also international trading systems, via both the metropolis and the provincial ports.

II

The connective role and power of cities and towns that this suggests is most clearly evidenced by the economic structures and developments that underpinned the early modern growth of London. As Keith Wrightson argues, circa 1500 ‘the market’ already existed as

‘four overlapping spheres of commercial activity’. At the most basic level was ‘the intensive small-scale dealing which took place among the inhabitants of an immediate locality’, whether a lordship, village, or town. A second sphere of activity ‘comprising rural-urban and inter-urban trade at the level of the district, ‘country’ or sub-region’ centred on larger and smaller market towns. These ‘market areas’ fed into a ‘third level of interconnection’:

‘trading networks’ based first and foremost on provincial capitals ‘which tied particular countries into regional and interregional systems of interdependence, and on occasion connected them further with international networks of exchange’. It was through these networks that domestic foodstuffs, raw materials, manufactured goods and luxury products 10 circulated around the country and foreign luxury goods like wine, spices, and fine finished fabrics were imported and distributed inland. Finally, at the apex of these networks was

London: like other capital cities it was by far the largest market for domestic goods and services and the principal hub for international trade.13

In the early sixteenth century cities and towns experienced challenges precipitated by the

‘ruralisation’ of certain industries – in particular cloth – whereby manufacturing began to be concentrated in de-regulated rural settlements rather than urban craft economies. This trend itself represented a new kind of urban connectivity, as urban-based merchant capitalists took advantage of cheap labour and the lack of regulation in rural pastoral areas to establish new cloth-manufacturing districts. Certain towns and cities suffered as a result. In Yorkshire it was West Riding townships like Leeds rather than established cities like York that became centres of the textile industry. Elsewhere conglomerations of small towns and villages that were incorporated into ‘putting out’ or ‘domestic’ systems of production engendered new kinds of urban/rural interpenetration and relationships: in easte Somerset and western

Wiltshire, in south east and the Kentish weald, on the uplands of north-central

Wales, and in the Stour Valley between Suffolk and Essex. By the middle of the eighteenth century agglomerations of industrial townships – for example around Leeds, Halifax,

Sheffield, Birmingham, Sunderland, and – had become as important as old and new imperial ports like Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow in reshaping the scale, weight, and culture of the English and Scottish urban systems.14

While this preference for de-regulated rural manufacture over traditional craft production set an important precedent for subsequent industrial development, it did not mark the demise of the traditional urban system. On the contrary, from the middle of the sixteenth century it began the sustained period of demographic growth outlined above, despite the pronounced problems of both ‘background’ and ‘crisis’ mortality – always present and sometimes 11 catastrophic – that inevitably characterised urban living.15 Urban migration could be seasonal or permanent, desperate or opportunistic, reactive or part of household strategies. It also involved the thousands of immigrants who settled in London and the cities of the South East after the onset of Europe’s religious wars, bringing with them new skills and production techniques. In the meantime the intensification of agricultural production and the specialization of urban manufacture saw the need for larger and more integrated markets.

Market towns were busier with goods and people, their hinterlands wider, their consumers more sociologically diverse, their reach into the country deeper. In the meantime the greater volume of long-distance transactions saw the popularization of fiscal practices, such as inland bills of exchange, and a proliferation of litigation in Westminster and urban courts when transactions went wrong.16

The traffic and commerce of provincial capitals and the metropolis likewise intensified. It facilitated the growing integration of regional economies and the more gradual but cumulatively transformative expansion of overseas trade: first with the ports and entrepots of the Baltic, Iberia and the Levant from the 1570s; then with Asian cities and markets from the early 1600s; and finally with the establishment of the American colonies from the 1610s.17

Urban centres connected and constituted each sphere of commercial expansion and colonization; and it was through the metropolis, provincial capitals, and market towns back home that the increasing volume of new commodities reached consumers.18 Moreover the emergence of the joint stock company as the preferred institution of global commerce connected city and country in new financial webs of inter-dependency. Rather than citizen- merchants forming regulated companies and undertaking to trade themselves, as was customary in Europe and the Levant, stockholders from disparate backgrounds increasingly invested in a company organization, like the East India Company, which then oversaw the business of salaried employees.19 In the meantime, ‘interlopers’ or non-company members 12 sought to trade independently of these corporate monopolies. Either way, traditional urban communities were unable to dominate the profits of empire in the same way that they were unable to control and exploit modern manufacturing.

Two modes of urban-based communication epitomised the connective importance of the urban system. From the 1560s postal routes and towns created ‘corridors of inter-urban communication and contact’ between the provinces and metropolis: whereas in 1566 two postal roads connected London to Dover in the south and Berwick in the north, by 1605

Portsmouth, Penryn and Padstow (Cornwall), Barnstaple, Holyhead (via Birmingham),

Carlisle, Penrith, Dale (via Bristol and Swansea), Ludlow, Margate and Sandwich were final destinations. In the seventeenth century the system was formalized, timetabled, and was

‘crucial in shaping the social, political, and economic geography of England and Wales’20.

Equally indicative of the connective nature of early modern urbanization are the coastal trade and ports. Their increasing business is retained in port books: customs records for domestic and overseas trade that were introduced for 122 maritime centres in 1565.21 Diachronically these records show the steady increase in both the volume and variety of domestic and overseas trade before 1650 and the rapid proliferation of both thereafter.22 They also suggest that while London remained the primary urban hub – as both the main destination and point of re-distribution for domestic and overseas goods – provincial urban systems like the Bristol

Channel could also be transformed by the burgeoning weight of traffic.23

Witness statements from a probate dispute in the city of York in 1681 illustrate the extent and social depth of urban connectivity by the second half of the seventeenth century. The will was that of Elizabeth Smith and the dispute centred on whether her son, William, was alive to inherit her modest fortune. William’s existence was in doubt because nearly twenty years earlier, in the 1660s, he had been transported at the instigation of his parents to ‘Barbados or

Virginia’ due to his ‘Extravagant and riotous ways of living’. That the colonies should 13 already be somewhere for the Smiths to send their profligate son is one indication of

England’s extended urban connections: William was accordingly shipped from York to Hull to London and so on to Bridgetown. The ship, however, never arrived; and a second intimation of England’s urban reach is the account of the York mariner Peter Buttery spending the next ten years enquiring after William in the many ports he visited – from

Bordeaux to La Rochelle to Stockholm.

But it was the provenance of the rumour that William had in fact survived his journey that really brings home the quotidian mobility of early modern lives. Catherine Beckwith recalled that in 1678, ‘being then at London on board a vessel on the River Thames at Billingsgate designed for York […] she heard one by the name of William Ellis of Kingston-Upon-Hull call of one William Smith saying ‘What cheer?’’ Intrigued, Beckwith ‘made enquiry (hearing

Smith answer) what Smith he was and where he was born’. Smith answered ‘I am William

Smith son of York and was born in St Andrew Gate’ and

he inquired how his father and mother did and desired this examinant to present his

duty to them and told her if time permit he would send a token to his father and

mother by her but being at some distance could not … being then bound for Virginia.

Beckwith did, however, take note of the mark that confirmed, for her, his identity as her friend’s son: a scar on his cheek accidently given him as a child by his mother.

This casual description of an ordinary woman waiting to sail back to York from London points to the everyday impact of maritime traffic. Even more striking is what William allegedly did next. Dorras Semore deposed that Elizabeth had visited her house three years earlier and asked her to read a letter that ‘she had lately received from her son William’. It transpired that he was ‘married and very well and desired her said mother to make much of herself and withal had sent her a five shilling piece’. Whether the letter was sent from 14

Jamestown or London is unclear. What it does show is that the prospect of ordinary householders exchanging letters and tokens nationally or internationally was well within the bounds of possibility, even when the recipient had to ask a neighbour to read it for her.24

III

The connective impact of urbanization stemmed from the intensification of inherited practices and technologies – to do with markets, for example, or shipping – as well as the development of newer configurations and infrastructures such as industrial agglomerations and postal routes. This mutable continuity also characterised English structural urbanization and the manner in which urban institutions came to shape and constitute ostensibly national processes and developments. This is particularly true of the early modern state, which appropriated medieval urban institutions in order to regulate manufacture and commerce nationally and also to cope with the social consequences of capitalization and commercialization intimated by Burton.25

Early modern people inherited a very clear sense of the urban based on medieval notions of corporatism, citizenship, freedom, and commonweal. Conceptually this legacy involved independent householders participating in the formal urban community: becoming a burgess, freeman, or citizen and undertaking public roles and responsibilities in return for economic liberties, such as the right to practice a trade and access to common lands. Institutionally, medieval urbanism centred on the councils, assemblies, courts, and offices in which public decision-making was organized and implemented and communal resources protected.26

Before the Reformation, associational bodies like guilds, chantries, and fraternities supplemented the formal community: these were often powerful and wealthy institutions that could exert decisive power in a town. Moreover townsmen often shared urban space or were subordinate to powerful institutions outwith their formal and informal communities: for 15 example, bishoprics, abbeys and monasteries; colleges and universities; royal and noble lordships.

An important assumption of the ‘crisis’ interpretation of early modern urbanism is that over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries this medieval inheritance was denuded and destroyed. Not only did the Reformation hit towns badly, leaving them institutionally threadbare and culturally bereft, but the political powers, autonomy, and community of townsmen was compromised both by external encroachments and new oligarchic hierarchies of power.27 More recently, however, an alternative narrative of structural urbanization, as opposed to degradation, has emerged. This centres in the first instance on the surprising fate of the formal urban community: the institutions upon which urban freedom and citizenship traditionally depended. First, from the early decades of the sixteenth century burgesses and citizens increasingly petitioned for charters of incorporation from the Attorney General in London. These expensive and valuable documents enhanced the power and status of citizens by formally recognizing in law urban communities and the corporate institutions, resources, and powers they claimed. In so doing, they also acknowledged the inter-dependency of urban and central authority and the lines of communication upon which this relationship rested. This facilitated, secondly, the systematization of the institutions, procedures, and offices of urban citizenship. Over time the nomenclature of mayor, aldermen, and common councilmen became standard; the appointment of legal officers like recorders, clerks, and high stewards became normal; elective and bureaucratic procedures were regularised; and the extension of governmental responsibilities was accepted. The result, third, was an amplification of public powers within the urban community. On the one hand, citizenship became a palimpsest for state power: it became standard for aldermen and mayors to serve as magistrates, and the number of cities and towns able to elect parliamentary representatives increased significantly over the period. 16

On the other hand, the associational diversity and material wealth that characterised the late medieval town was not so much destroyed by the Reformation as repositioned within the body of what contemporaries styled ‘city commonwealths’. Indeed, as Robert Tittler has shown, one of the main reasons behind incorporation was the need for citizens and freemen to ratify and guarantee this transfer of resources.28

This resulted, fourthly, in a certain homogenisation of urban space and association. Just as the urban corporation increasingly formed an umbrella institution under which guilds, companies, and other citizen bodies legitimately functioned, so the dissolution of religious institutions and liberties gave citizens the opportunity to exert greater authority over the urban environment (indeed by the seventeenth century only the bishoprics survived as serious governmental rivals).29 But this process also led, fifthly, to social reconfigurations and conflict within urban communities. Affluent elites – especially merchants, wholesalers, and wealthier artisans – exhibited ‘aristocratic’, ‘patrician’ or ‘oligarchic’ pretensions that justified their monopoly of civic governance and enhanced their claims to social status and superiority. Others resisted and in some instances espoused a ‘plebeian’, ‘popular’, or

‘democratic’ position in order to defend what they presented as ‘customary’ rights, liberties, and access to resources.30 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there was a huge proliferation in the number of towns and cities that became formally incorporated or experienced at least some of the infrastructural developments associated with ‘city commonwealths’ – a process that Tittler nicely associates with the rise of the town hall.31 Far from witnessing the death of medieval corporatism, that is, the early modern period saw its revitalisation and expansion into a national corporate system of city commonwealths with

London as its hub. The scale and extent of this process is suggested by Figure 3, which shows not only how intensive English incorporation was compared to Scotland after 1500, but also how it became a tool of colonization in the Ulster plantations in the 1610s. Thereafter the 17 reproduction of chartered and incorporated settlements across the Atlantic became a crucial dynamic of English colonial settlement.32

Figure 3

From Phil Withington, ‘Plantation and civil society’ in Eamonn O Ciardha and Micheal O Siochru, eds., The plantation of Ulster: ideology and practice (Manchester, 2012), 70.

The revitalised structures of medieval urbanism were a constitutive feature of the early modern state and political economy. Some of the key parliamentary statutes of the era originated in governmental practices and experiments in larger cities like London and

Norwich.33 The procedures of apprenticeship as outlined in the definitive 1563 Statute of

Artificers marked one such translation from the urban to the national; the series of acts establishing parochial poor relief between the 1570s and the 1600s another.34 That these traits of urban citizenship were successfully inscribed in statute reflected, in turn, the burgeoning presence of MPs representing urban constituencies in the House of Commons. The proportion of urban MPs was four-fifths by 1641. Likewise the implementation of legislation 18 provincially depended in large part on the corporate system. Although historians of early- modern state-formation have almost entirely neglected its urban dimensions, contemporaries did not. The Council of Ireland in Dublin rehearsed a familiar argument in 1552 when it explained to the Privy Council in London that it was ‘Cities and towns from whence all Civil and good orders sprang: and thereby doth chiefly continue through the universal world where any Commonwealth remains’.35 More prosaically, Michael Dalton observed in The country justice that there were three types of JP: a small number of senior clerics appointed by ‘act of

Parliament’; the large number of county justices who were commissioned by the Lord

Chancellor (and who have monopolised historiographical attention); and the significant number of JPs appointed ‘by Grant made by the king by his Letters Patent’: ‘as Mayors and chief officers in diverse corporate towns’. Dalton explained that the crucial difference between county and corporate JPs was that while the former could be relieved of their office by simply having their commission removed, the king was unable either to select or discharge the latter ‘at his pleasure’. Indeed once an urban community was granted the right to select its magistrates no rival authority could be commissioned to serve within its jurisdiction until the charter was legally revoked.36 That the Tudor and early Stuart regimes proceeded to empower urban communities despite this remarkable discrepancy reflects the symbiotic relationship between city and state in the century after 1540 – a degree of trust and reciprocity reflected in the proliferation of urban parliamentary constituencies. Equally revealing is the chronic instability and partisanship that overtook the state after 1640, when urban communities were politicised and consecutive regimes challenged the magisterial autonomy and parliamentary influence of citizens by attacking their charters.37 No ruler distrusted or attacked the privileges of citizens and freemen more than James II; his eventual abdication suggests, among other things, just how integral their place in the commonwealth and state had become.38 19

Urban apprenticeship was likewise fundamental to the political economy of the period, not least because the 1563 Act applied the rules practiced in London nationwide. Apprentices were contracted to a master for seven years, during which time they worked in exchange for instruction and could not marry. In urban communities, successful completion after the age of twenty four gave apprentices access to freedom and the right to establish their own working households. Stephan Epstein and others have accordingly argued that by effectively providing skills, knowledge, and human capital the institution contributed to the technological innovation and economic growth that precipitated industrialization.39 In contrast, Sheila

Ogilvie claims that apprenticeship and the guilds more were generally protectionist, exclusionary, and an economic hindrance: it was the relative weakness of English corporatism compared to the continent that explains its economic success. The answer probably lies somewhere between. On the one hand, it is incontrovertible that guild organizations in general and apprenticeship in particular remained foundational economic institutions in England until the second half of the eighteenth century. As late as 1700 ‘over 9 per cent of English males became apprentices’ in London alone and provincial centres continued to serve their hinterlands.40 Whatever its consequences, apprenticeship structured economic training either in the regular contracts recorded in urban archives or as a template for the innumerable unrecorded arrangements made outwith the corporate system.41 On the other hand, recent work suggests that, in terms of its practice, apprenticeship was a much more open, fluid and flexible institution than its formal rules suggest. Urban apprenticeships were characterised by trial periods and early terminations; absenteeism was common, as was movement between masters, trades, and cities in the course of an indenture. Completion rates were surprisingly low, with four years an alternative preferred period of training to seven; and in London and Bristol at least, only 40 per cent of apprentices progressed to citizenship.42

All this suggests that, like early modern magistracy, apprenticeship was characterised by 20 discretion and the need to make the institution work for all parties involved: apprentice, family, master, craft. Perhaps more importantly, it also points to the cumulative creation of a mobile and skilled labour market of journeymen and servants capable of working for others or setting up house beyond the boundaries of the corporate system – not least in the newer manufacturing agglomerations that characterised the period.43

IV

In important respects the story of the English state was also one of urbanization: it developed through, rather than despite, the structures of medieval urbanism. This was concurrent with a second set of changes involving not so much traditional urban citizenship as the efflorescence of cultural and professional services – in education, in law, in communications, in sociability

– that were located primarily, if not uniquely, in cities and towns. The urban system inculcated the massive expansion of England’s urban educational infrastructure: in the petty schools; in ‘free’, ‘public’ and ‘private’ schools; and in the university colleges, academies, and legal Inns that proliferated from the late fifteenth century.44 It facilitated the well- documented increase in legal provision and legal business that made England in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a more litigious society than the contemporary

USA: in the borough courts, in the central courts in London and their provincial outlets meeting in county towns (quarter sessions, Assizes, and extraordinary commissions), and in the ecclesiastical courts centred in cathedral precincts and the universities.45 It was integral to transformations in communication and representation: most obviously in the establishment of the metropolitan-based print trade but also in the emergence of professional theatre companies and a vernacular literary and playing tradition.46 Finally it was in the urban system that the less-heralded expansion of licensed and commercial sites of consumption and association occurred. This latter development – sometimes known as the ‘town’ in contradistinction to the traditional ‘city’– involved at once the growing nexus of traditional 21 venues such alehouses, taverns, and inns and the opening, from the middle of the seventeenth century, of newer establishments like coffeehouses, assembly rooms, and gin-houses.47 From the 1590s in London and subsequent decades in provincial capitals and market centres these institutions structured new modes of urbane (and not so urbane) behaviour.48 It is for these reasons that Borsay describes an ‘urban renaissance’ by the last quarter of the seventeenth century, whereby provincial urbanity had become intrinsic to the formation of polite and civil society for the gentry and middling sorts more generally.49

Viewed in these terms it is not difficult to see how urban culture was congruent with cultural patterns and trends more generally. Institutional intensification and innovation across the urban system was the most obvious marker of these developments: more schools and colleges; busier law courts and taverns; new theatres, booksellers, and coffeehouses: districts outwith the traditional city known for their cultural and legal services. There were sociological ramifications, too. On the one hand the producers and professionals who manned and ran these institutions, and who were versed in the skills and expertise associated with them, formed a growing and influential section of the urban populace. Schoolteachers, clerics, and academic fellows; the host of legal occupations, from clerks and solicitors to barristers and judges; publishers, translators, authors, hawkers; impresarios, victuallers, vintners, cooks – together they formed an emergent social grouping that did not fit at all easily in the established social order, and which demarcated the interface between town and country in new ways. On the other hand, the groups attracted to use or visit the institutions – whether as students and apprentices, litigants and readers, groundlings or gallants, visitors and shoppers – not only made for more heterogeneous urban environments. The wider appropriation of urban services and resources could not help but impact on the generations of rural inhabitants attending schools, bringing suits, reading almanacs, listening to sermons, or visiting a tavern. In this respect it was not just the urbane gentry and intelligentsia who 22 embodied, as it were, the emergence of the town, but also the host of urban and non-urban inhabitants who appropriated the services and expertise located in the urban system.

Literacy rates are perhaps the most obvious marker of urban congruency, with literariness and legalism not far behind.50 Whether they corroborate Wrigley’s model of a move from

‘traditional’ to ‘rational’ society is much less obvious. Certainly the career of a man who in many respects personifies the extent of English urbanization by the middle of the seventeenth century was no harbinger of Weberian modernity. John Lilburne hailed from a lesser gentry family in Durham with interests in Sunderland industry; attended the free grammar schools in the market town of Bishop Auckland and provincial capital of Newcastle; was apprenticed to a London wholesale clothier with extensive trading and religious connections; imported illegal books from Amsterdam into London and became a polemicist himself (encountering the wrath of the law in the process); was set up as a London brewer by his Sunderland uncle while keeping company with London separatists and marrying Elizabeth Dewall, daughter of a London merchant; was involved in the ‘apprentice’ riots against Strafford in 1641 and a year later enlisted to fight for parliament. Even before he became a propagandist of that quintessential London movement – the Levellers – Lilburne was formed and empowered by the urban system.51

The resonance between urbanism and the two cultural tendencies with which this chapter concludes likewise suggest a more complicated story than Wrigley tells. The first of these was the associational basis of urban life and the proliferation – rather than diminution – of associational possibilities within urban environments over the course of the period. Such possibilities included the formal corporate organizations of city commonwealths: the common councils, assemblies, guilds and companies that provided the institutional basis of urban citizenship. They included the proliferation of informal sociability and more formal clubs, societies, and voluntary associations that gathered in the drinking places and other 23 social spaces of the town. They encompassed parochial communities and, over the course of the seventeenth-century, the proliferation of dissenting churches, congregations, and ‘parties’.

By the eighteenth century they also included working men’s combinations and middle class subscription groups. In a very real sense, that is, early modern urbanism was defined by the capacity for collective action and agency, or what contemporaries came to describe as

‘society’; and urbanization marked the proliferation of this capacity both within urban environments and as a template for purposeful association elsewhere.52 But these associational habits were also rooted in the more perennial webs of relationships and emotional ties – the friendships, enmities, kinship, neighbourliness, and reciprocities – that were simply inherent to the propinquity of urban living. Such bonds were never better revealed than when they were most challenged. As Wrightson has found, ‘the response to the plague of 1636 in Newcastle confirms the power and resilience of the associational life of the city’. Rather than disintegrating into the kind of apocalyptic dystopia envisaged by plague treatises, the catastrophe prompted the ‘refusal of people who shared a space, knowledge of one another (good and ill), and obligations to one another (reluctant or willing) to renege upon those commitments’.53 The same sense of society was revealed by the host of witnesses drawn into the dispute over Elizabeth Smith’s estate. In the course of their respective testimonies they described a range of behaviours – relating to commerce, retail, literacy, travel, and litigation – characteristic of, though not unique to, urban living. Elizabeth’s female friends in particular also demonstrated a palpable sense of neighbourliness rooted in everyday propinquity, familiarity, and reciprocity.

The second congruence is that between urbanism and the assortment of social values and skills known as ‘civility’ or ‘honesty’.54 The appropriation of classical norms of behaviour and conduct is one of the defining characteristics of the early modern period and has been well charted by Anna Bryson, who uses behavioural handbooks to trace the gradual shift 24 from a culture of medieval courtesy to early-modern civility and politeness.55 Yet what is missing from Bryson’s account is the role of English urbanism in popularising these norms and translating them into practice. While this absence is unsurprising given English urbanism’s more general historiographical neglect, it is historically incongruous given the urban provenance of civility. As Bryson points out, in classical texts ‘civil’ was primarily a term of political description associated with the ‘city’ and ‘citizen’, carrying connotations that have subsequently been applied to ‘civic’. These semantics made sense to the Italian

Renaissance writers who first introduced the concept into European vernaculars, as it ‘fitted easily enough with the predominantly urban context of their own culture’. But Bryson suggests that it was nonsense in a place like England which, ‘like France, was a country dominated by a rural aristocracy’. Indeed so convinced is Bryson that there was no aspect of

English society that could ‘in any concrete sense, be defined as ‘civic’, still less ‘bourgeois’’, she is forced to contradict the claims of the first English proponents of civility that she cites.56

However, subsequent work on everyday notions of ‘honour’, ‘credit’, and ‘civility’ has shown that permutations of these values were widely promulgated, enforced, and appropriated in the century or so after 1550. The codes of conduct and discourse that characterised the institutions of urban citizenship have been found to be expressly civil in nature: the expansion of the corporate system standardised and disseminated these norms.57

The civil sociability of the town and the urban renaissance was likewise predicated on emulating classical conventions.58 But perhaps most strikingly, the increasing recourse of ordinary male and female householders to urban-based courts of civil and ecclesiastical law in order to protect and contest their honour, credit, and reputation was one of the defining features of the age.59 Not only were these courts situated in cities, and so drew thousands of plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses into the urban system; urban inhabitants were also much more likely to become embroiled in legal business than their rural counterparts.60 The 25 widespread and complicated appropriation of these legally enforced norms has been found to be fundamental to social relations and economic exchange and ‘is likely to have informed processes of identity-making rather than simply recorded them’.61 It also encapsulates the centrality – and invisibility – of urbanization to early modern English society.

V

When Robert Burton described the pauperism and paucity of England’s urban culture in 1621 he was looking to answer a specific question: ‘Our land is fertile we may not deny, full of all good things, and why doth it not then abound with Cities, as well as Italy, France, Germany, the Low Countries?’ For Burton the answer was simple: ‘idleness is the malus Genius of our nation’. Drawing on classical authorities, Burton argued that ‘fertility of a country is not enough, except art and industry by joined unto it’. And for Burton urbanism – or the lack of it

– was the proof in the pudding.62

In certain respects Burton was not far off the mark. In crude demographic terms England was much less urbanized that either the Low Countries or Italy in 1621. Nor is there any doubt that just as English towns and cities had faced significant economic and social challenges over the last hundred years, so Italian, Dutch and Flemish cities were the cradles of the most advanced political economies in Europe. What Burton could not appreciate is that the absence of many large, populous, and autonomous cities did not reflect the lack of ‘art and industry’ so much as their national distribution by other means. On the one hand, manufacturing and extractive industries were increasingly concentrated in agglomerations of households that were outwith the traditional urban system. On the other hand, this system had itself been revitalised as a hub for local, national and international commerce and services, as a constitutive feature of the early modern state, and as a cultural crucible. Burton himself was educated at the grammar school in the market town of Nuneaton (founded 1552) and lived his 26 adult life in Oxford; but like John Lilburne, his persona is taken to be English rather than urban. Economically connective, politically constitutive, culturally congruent: it was not the decrepitude of English urbanism so much as the integrative power of English urbanization that characterised early modern English society. In this respect it is perhaps best to leave the last word to William Smith. The York merchant William Bell deposed in 1676 that he was drinking at York River in Virginia ‘in one Mrs Leake’s house there’ when ‘one William

Smith by name came into his company’. Bell recalled that when he asked this forced migrant

‘what Smith he was [Smith] told him he was a Yorkshire man born and was born at York’.63

Like the childhood scar observed by Catherine Beckwith, the city lived with him still.

27

1 Robert Burton, The anatomy of melancholy (1621), 52-3.

2 Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds., Crisis and order in English towns, 1500–1700: essays in urban history (London, 1972); Charles Phythian Adams, Desolation of a city: Coventry and the urban crisis of the late middle ages (Cambridge, 1979).

3 Peter Clark, ‘“The Ramoth-Gilead of the Good”: urban change and political radicalism at Gloucester’ reprinted in Johnathan Barry, ed., The Tudor and Stuart town (Harlow, 1988), 244-74.

4 Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds., English towns in transition, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 1976); Peter Borsay, The English urban renaissance: culture and society in the provincial towns, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989).

5 E. Anthony Wrigley, ‘A Simple Model of London’s Importance in Changing English Society and Economy, 1650–1750’, P&P, 37, 1967, 44-70; Ian Archer, The pursuit of stability: social relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991); Paul Griffiths, Lost : change, crime and control in the capital city 1550–1660 (Cambridge, 2008).

6 Paul Griffith and Mark Jenner, eds., Londonopolis: essays in the cultural and social history of early modern London (Manchester, 2001).

7 Peter Laslett, The world we have lost – further explored (London, 2000), 56-7.

8 Jonathan Barry, ‘Bourgeois collectivism? Urban association and the middling sort’ in Barry and Christopher Brooks, eds., The middling sort of people: culture, society and politics in England 1550–1800 (Basingstoke, 1994); Patrick Collinson, The birthpangs of Protestant England. Religious change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Basingstoke, 1988), 28-60; Robert Tittler, Architecture and power. The town hall and the English urban community, 1500–1640 (Oxford, 1991); idem., The Reformation and the towns in England. Politics and political culture, c. 1540–1640 (Oxford, 1998); Phil Withington, The politics of commonwealth. Citizens and freemen in early modern England (Cambridge, 2005).

9 Jan de Vries, European urbanization 1500–1800 (London, 1984), 10-17.

10 E. A. Wrigley, ‘A simple model of London’s importance in changing English society and economy, 1650–1750’, P&P, 37, 1967, 65-68; idem., ‘Urban growth and agricultural change: England and the continent in the early modern period’, reprinted in Peter Borsay, ed., The eighteenth century town (Harlow, 1990), 79-80. 28

11 Ann Kussmaul, A general view of the rural economy of England, 1538–1840 (Cambridge, 1990), 138- 40.

12 Charles Phythian Adams, Societies, cultures and kinship, 1580–1850. Cultural provinces and English local history (Leicester, 1996), 9-23.

13 Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities. Economic lives in early modern Britain (Newhaven, 200), 93-7.

14 Wrigley, ‘Urban Growth’, 78-9; Wrightson, Earthly necessities, 107-8.

15 Paul Slack, The impact of plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1990); Keith Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s summer: a scrivener, his city and the plague (Newhaven, 2011), 28-42; idem., Earthly necessities, 164.

16 C. W. Brookes, ‘Interpersonal conflict and social tension: civil litigation in England, 1640-1830’ in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine and J. M. Rosenheim, eds., The first modern society (Cambridge, 1989), 357-99; Craig Muldrew, The economy of obligation (Basingstoke, 1998), chapter 8, 338-44.

17 Wrightson, Earthly necessities, 176-7.

18 Nuala Zahedieh, The capital and the colonies. London and the Atlantic economy 1660 – 1700 (Cambridge, 2010); David Hussey, Coastal and river trade in pre-industrial England: Bristol and its region 1680–1730 (Exeter, 2000).

19 Thanks to William Pettigrew for discussions on this point.

20 Mark Brayshay, ‘Royal post-horse routes in England and Wales: the evolution of the network in the later-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries’, Journal of Historical Geography, 17, 4 (1991), 377, 387.

21 Hussey, Coastal and river trade, 7.

22 T. S. Willan, The Inland Trade (Manchester, 1976), 26-41; T. S. Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade (Manchester, 1959), especially chapter 3.

23 Hussey, Coastal and river trade, 78-99.

24 Borthwick Institute, CPH 3497, 1681, Mabson c. Richardson and Saltmarsh. Depositions of Grace Harrison; Richard Moore; Peter Buttery; Catherine Beckwith; Dorcas Semore. 29

25 The main accounts almost entirely ignore the urban. See Michael Braddick, State formation in early modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000); Steve Hindle, The state and social change in early modern England (Basingstoke, 2000).

26 Withington, Politics of commonwealth, 85-99.

27 Collinson, Birthpangs, 56-9.

28 Tittler, Reformation, 57-103.

29 Barry, ‘Bourgeois collectivism?’, 108-9.

30 See a nice example see ‘Government and politics in Ludlow, 1590–1642’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological Society, 56, 1957/8, 282-94; Withington, Politics of commonwealth, 66-75.

31 Tittler, Architecture and power, 14-16; Withington, Politics of commonwealth, 18-24.

32 Mark Peterson, ‘Boston pays tribute: autonomy and empire in the Atlantic world, 1630-1714’ in Allan I. Macinnes and Arthur H. Williamson, Shaping the Stuart world, 1603-1714: The Atlantic connections, ed. (Leiden, 2005), 311-335.

33 Jennifer Bishop, ‘Utopia and civic politics in mid-sixteenth century London’, HJ, 2011, 54 (4), 933-53.

34 Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 156; Chris Minns and Patrick Wallis, ‘Rules and Reality: Quantifying the Practice of Apprenticeship in Early Modern England’, EcHR, 65, 2 (2012), 556.

35 SP 61/4/5, Council of Ireland to the Privy Council, 27 January 1552 (Dublin); cited in Jennifer Bishop, *Thesis awaiting viva*.

36 Michael Dalton, The country justice (1619), 10.

37 Paul Halliday, Dismembering the body politic: partisan politics in England’s towns 1650–1730 (Cambridge, 1998).

38 Phil Withington, ‘Public discourse, corporate citizenship and state-formation in early modern England’, AHR, 112, 4 (2007), 1016–38.

39 S. R. Epstein, ‘Craft guilds, apprenticeship, and technological change in preindustrial Europe’, Journal of Economic History, 58 (1998), 687-92; Jane Humphries, ‘English apprenticeship: a neglected factor in the first industrial revolution’ in P. A. David and M. Thomas, eds., The 30

economic future in historical perspective (Oxford, 2003), 74-85; Jan van Zanden, ‘The skill premium and the ‘Great Divergence’’, European Review of Economic History, 13 (2009), 139-40.

40 Chris Minns and Patrick Wallis, ‘Rules and reality: Quantifying the practice of apprenticeship in early modern England’, EcHR, 65, 2 (2012), 559; Wrightson, Earthly necessities, 165; Chris Galley, The demography of early modern towns: York in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Liverpool, 1998), 134-6.

41 Tim Leunig, Chris Minns, Patrick Wallis, ‘Networks in the pre-modern economy: the market for London apprenticeships, 1600-1749’, The Journal of Economic History, 71, 2 (June 2011), 421.

42 Minns and Wallis, ‘Rules and reality’, 562, 567, 570, 574-6.

43 Thanks to Patrick Wallis for talking about these issues.

44 Lawrence Stone, ‘The educational revolution in England, 1560-1640’, Past and Present (1964) 28(1), 41-80.

45 Christopher Brooks, Pettyfoggers and vipers of the commonwealth. The lower branch of the legal profession in early modern England (Cambridge, 1986), 79.

46 Elizabeth S. Eisenstein, The printing press as an agent of change (Cambridge, 1980); Tom Rutter, ‘Issues in review: Dramatists, playing companies, and repertories’, Early Theatre 13.3 (2011), 121- 89.

47 Ian W. Archer, ‘Social networks in Restoration London: the evidence of Samuel Pepys’s diary’ in Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington, eds., Communities in early modern England (Manchester, 2000), 76-96; Phil Withington, ‘Intoxication and the early modern city’ in Steve Hindle et al, Remaking English society (Woodbridge, 2013), 135-65; Brian Cowan, The social life of coffee: the emergence of the British coffeehouse (Newhaven, 2005).

48 Michelle O’Callaghan, The English wits. Literature and sociability in early modern England (Cambridge, 2007); Phil Withington, ‘Intoxicants and society in early modern England’, HJ, 54, 3 (2011), pp. 631-57.

49 Borsay, English urban renaissance, 311-20.

50 Keith Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s summer, 66-7, 176; David Cressy, Literacy and the social order: Reading and writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), 119-22; Christopher Brooks, 31

‘Apprenticeship, social mobility and the middling sort, 1550–1800’ in Barry and Brooks, eds., Middling sort, 69-83; idem., ‘Professions, ideology and the middling sort in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries’ in Barry and Brooks, eds., Middling sort, 113-41.

51 Withington, Politics of commonwealth, 13, 80, 122; Andrew Sharp, ‘Lilburne, John (1615?–1657)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2006 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16654, accessed 8 Dec 2014]; Phil Withington, ‘Urban citizens and the England’s civil wars’ in Michael Braddick, ed., The Oxford handbook of the English revolution (Oxford, 2015), 323-4.

52 Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism?’, 85-8; Peter Clark, British clubs and societies 1580–1800: the origins of an associational world (Oxford, 2000); Phil Withington, Society in early modern England. The vernacular origins of some powerful ideas (Cambridge, Polity, 2010), 102-34.

53 Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s Summer, 160-1

54 Brooks, ‘Apprenticeship’,77-8; Phil Withington, ‘Honestas’ in Henry Turner, ed., Early Modern Theatricality (Oxford, 2013), 525-32.

55 Norbert Elias, The civilizing process, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Anna Bryson, From courtesy to civility: changing codes of conduct in early modern England (Oxford, 1998).

56 Ibid., 60-1.

57 Barry, ‘Bourgeois collectivism?’, 106-7; idem., ‘Civility and civic culture in early modern England’ in Peter Burke, Paul Harrison and Paul Slack, eds., Civil histories (Oxford, 2000), 181– 97; Withington, ‘Public discourse’, 1028-34.

58 O’Callaghan, English wits, 6, 29; Borsay, English urban renaissance, 257-63.

59 Muldrew, Economy of obligation; Laura Gowing, Domestic dangers. Women, words and sex in early modern London (Oxford, 1998); Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of manhood in early modern England (Oxford, 2003).

60 Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for self. Worth, status and the social order in early modern England (Oxford, 2014), 16-7.

61 Ibid., 23-4.

62 Burton, Anatomy, 52-3. 32

63 Borthwick Institute, CPH 3497, 1681, Mabson c. Richardson and Saltmarsh, deposition of William Bell.